Our Time Is Now

This book tells the story of a Maya frontier in Alta Verapaz at the heart of Guatemalan national elites' dreams for building a modern nation based on coffee production and German immigration in the late nineteenth century, which ultimately became the center of anti-German revolutionary nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s. While charting these shifting elite efforts to define and create modernity, this book highlights how Mayas sought to carve out other modernities based on a blend of Maya cosmologies andradical liberalism. This work illustrates how state officials and non-Maya coffee planters disavowed these alternative projects. Our Time is Now thus focuses on the potency of historical time in the making of modernity and race as well as the limits of writing disenchanted history. Bridging the fields of subaltern and new capitalism studies, this book highlights the centrality of race and indigenous coerced labor in the formation of capitalism and demonstrates the legacy of nineteenth-century political and economic struggles in Guatemala's bloody civil war--